Taking a successful series and creating a spin-off, whether directly or as more of a spiritual successor, is not uncommon in gaming. Persona was an off-shoot of Shin Megami Tensei. Nier came from Drakengard. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disgaea was born from the Rhapsody 💜series. What’s rarer is a spin-off of a game that is itself a spin-off. That’s exactly what 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hope is.
You may have recognised the adorable chubby cow in the Silent Hope trailer, a mascot of the Story of Seasons series.🎉 That&rsquꩲo;s because Silent Hope is an offshoot of Rune Factory, which in turn is a spin-off of Story of Seasons.
At Gamescom, I spoke with Silent Hope producer Makoto Shioda and scenario writer Honoka Moriwaki, who told me Silent Hope shares its world w🐎ith Rune Factory. Shioda-san explains it’s only loosely based on Rune Factory, so there were no restrictions to conform to for lore or mechanics, and they had creative freedom to come up with new 💛themes and ideas.
However, he also says there was one aspect they felt compelled to retain, “There’s one thing we wanted to keep [the same as] the Rune Factory world. When you defeat monsters, we don’t use the expression ‘kill’. We just return them𝔍 to their original world. We also use the same expression. The reason we wanted to keep it as that is [because] that’s Rune Factory’s characteristi♑c that makes it stand apart from other RPGs.”
Story of Seasons is a farming sim with social aspects, while Rune Factory blended these ideas with RPG mechanics like dungeon crawling for a fr💎esh mix. Silent Hope i𒁏s one more step removed, seemingly focusing more on being a hack-n-slash action RPG with some crafting and farming elements still present, though in smaller quantities.
🐻With such a wealth of RPGs hitting store shelves these days, it’s more important than ever for games to stand out from the crowd. For Silent Hope, it not only has two older sibling series to live up to, but it has to make its ow🎀n mark as a success.
Shioda-san explains that they want to emphasise the action in Silent Hope being an action RPG. The different battle styles, weapons, and levelling up—they want players to enjoy all of that. “Generally, in action RPGs, you have one character, and you can change their weapons, but we have seven ♎characters who each have specific weapons. You can either♊ enjoy all these characters, or you can just use one character in a traditional way.”
The character you choose doesn’t change how 🥂the story unfolds, but it allows you to switch up your playstyle whenever you like, jumping to a different character for more varied gameplay. Som🅰e characters are more suited for newcomers and offer more balanced playstyles, like the Wanderer, while someone like the Caster might be better suited for a more skilled player. Shioda-san tells me that his favourite character to play is the Farmer, while Moriwaki-san’s is the Wanderer.
Moriwaki-san tells me that when picking a theme for Silent Hop👍e, the team wanted to find something that would feel familiar that people could relate 𒊎to from their everyday lives in some way. She tells me, “Through this setting of a world without words, we want players to reconsider what words really mean to us in our daily lives.”
However, this theme and setting posed a new challenge for the team: how do you tell a story in a wo꧒rld with no words? Moriwaki san explains, “Usually, stories are told through dialogue between characters, so because we chose this theme, that’s not possible anymore. That’s why we invented a new way of commu🔥nicating with each other through the Princess. The Princess tells them to do something, and they respond, even though they’re not communicating with each other.”
There’s a lot of dungeon delving involved in Silent Hope. You’ll be exploring the Abyss, a dungeon that changes every time you enter, battling it𓃲 through to collect items and resources before returning to Base Camp. At your camp, you can upgrade your gear and take advantage of each character’s non-combat speciality to indulge in something like cooking, farming, or carpentry.
This grindy rinse and repeat to make your characters stronger feels almost rogue-like, but Shioda-san assures me that Silent Hope isn’t that punishing. You can simply restart from the nearest checkpoint should you fall in battle, and you won’t lose all your weapons or items either𒀰.
Silent Hope has an adorably charming style, with little chibi characters who adventure in a 🅺bright and intriguing setting. The focus on dungeon diving coupled with the contrast of the base camp gameplay is an interesting mix, and I’m eager to see how well this gels together at launch. Only time will tell if Silent Hope can live up to the same success as Story of Seasons and Rune Factory, and we’ll find out when it launches on October 3 for Nintendo Switch and PC.
